In the field of data communication, the requirements on switching capacity of data products are increasingly higher. Currently, the switching capacity supported by a switched network dedicated chip is also more and more higher, the number of ports supported by the switched network dedicated chip is also more and more larger, such as 64×64 switching, 96×96 switching and 128×128 switching, and meanwhile, cascading of a three-stage CLOS network is also supported.
In the practical networking, there exists a great flexibility in the networking ways. In a condition that the switching capacity is satisfied, or in order to guarantee a connection robustness of the system, multiple link connections are set usually between switched network chips. On one hand, a utilization rate of ports of the switched network chips is improved; on the other hand, the transmission bandwidth between two chips is also improved. In order to make a description conveniently, a concept of port trunking (Trunk) of the switched network is proposed, which specifically refers to combining two or multiple physical ports together to constitute a logic port through register configuration, and the physical bandwidth of this logic port is equal to a sum of bandwidths of all member ports. Therefore, a method for flexibly networking and increasing port bandwidths is provided.
When N links are connected between two switched network chips, it is called that Trunk=N. FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of the connection of Trunks of the switched network, 4 link connections (101) exist between a switched network chip A and a switched network chip B, which is called as Trunk=4, and 6 link connections (102) exist between the switched network chip A and a switched network chip C, which is called as Trunk=6.
It is assumed that a chip D and a chip E in FIG. 1 are two destination chips respectively. When a destination address of a certain unicast cell is D, it is required to go through the switched network chip A to complete a load balancing link selection with the Trunk=4, reach the switched network chip B, and then reach the destination chip D; and when a destination address of a certain unicast cell is E, it is required to go through the switched network chip A to complete a load balancing link selection with the Trunk=6, reach the switched network chip C, and then reach the destination chip E. When destination addresses of a certain multicast cell are D and E, it is firstly required to complete cell replication of the two destination addresses at the switched network chip A, then one cell therein completes the load balancing link selection with the Trunk=4 and reaches the D through the B, and the other cell completes the load balancing link selection with the Trunk=6 and reaches the E through the C.
However, there still lacks an explicit settlement mechanism on how to implement the processing for data cells.